View full sizeGussy Moran and one her husbands during happy times.Oregonian File Photo

Gertrude Moran, one of the best American women tennis players of her time and a sensation at Wimbledon, has died. She was 89.

The lanky Californian won the U.S. Indoors in 1948 and reached the Wimbledon doubles final the following year. But it wasn't her stout forehand that made her the center of attention at the famous English tournament. It was her unconventionally short dress, which showed off tightly cut lace panties when she leaped and stretched. At her first match, newspaper photographers crouched down on the grass to photograph up her skirt. Embarrassed, she left the court with her racquet held over her face. The press dubbed her "Gorgeous Gussie." After the tournament, The All-England Club chastised her for bringing "vulgarity and sin into tennis."

Made to feel unwelcome by the prim poobahs who then ran the sport's major tournaments, Moran soon left Wimbledon and class-riven amateur tennis behind. She joined former Wimbledon champions Pauline Betz, Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer for a series of exhibitions, crisscrossing the U.S. for six months of one-night stands. She was promised $87,000 for participating but insisted she "hardly saw any of that."

The reason for the poor box office: tennis was still an exotic sport in much of America, the preserve of the elite. The international tour wouldn't open up to professionals for more than a decade, and so the average American didn't know much about it. Moran and her fellow barnstorming players tried to be inventive to keep the audience interested.

"When
things were dull (on a particular night), Riggs set up a ping-pong table on the traveling green
canvas court and played Betz at table tennis," Moran told The Oregonian last year. "They were both excellent... And
keeping the audience happy like today’s TV give-away shows with items
for attendees, Riggs would draw a winning number at intermission for a
fine watch; Kramer passed out plastic rings from Corn Flakes; and I
handed out orchids flown in daily from Honolulu. Now ain’t that all
something?"

It was something, and so was Moran. Though the least accomplished player on the marquee, she was unquestionably the biggest draw. Everyone knew about her lace panties.

"Gussy was a beautiful woman with a beautiful body," the late Kramer said in 2002. He added: "If Gussy had played in the era of television, no telling what would
have happened."

Moran, of course, probably had a pretty good idea what would have happened. She grew up in Hollywood, where her father worked as a sound technician at studios. As a teen she often played tennis at Charlie Chaplin's house, trading groundstrokes with Greta Garbo for hours. "My best friends were Charlie's children," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2002.

After hanging up her racquet in the early 1950s, Moran went into show business, hosting local radio and TV shows in New York and Los Angeles and appearing in the Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn movie "Pat and Mike." Her house became a salon of sorts, where celebrities could be found at all hours. In the '60s, she went to Vietnam with the U.S.O., where she survived a horrific helicopter crash.

The disastrous Vietnam trip was the beginning of a downward spiral for Moran. Her personal life proved consistently fraught with unhappiness (she was married three times, with each ending in tabloid headlines and no children). She had several abortions and would tell a chilling tale of being sexually assaulted in 1975. Money troubles plagued her later years. She worked anonymously in the gift shop of the Los Angeles Zoo for a time. She survived the past two decades by selling personal mementos from her career and through Social Security.

And yet despite it all, she remained upbeat, insisting she would do it all again.

"My only regret," she told the Los Angeles Times, "is this: I was about 16 and entered in a
local tournament. I had my driver's license and I wouldn't let my
mother drive me. She wanted to very much but I wanted my independence. I
realize now that my mother, who was a housewife, had only a few chances
to leave her world and be out, meet people, see different things. I see now that I was being quite selfish and to this day I have carried tremendous guilt about that Sunday afternoon."